Researchers at California Institute of Technology released a new video showing the performance of cameras. In the video, a laser beam passes through a bottle of milk at a speed of about 65.438+000 billion frames per second (in contrast, the shooting speed of most movies is 24 or 25 frames per second).
Boko Garden-Popular Science: In the final video, when the laser passes through the screen from left to right, the photons clearly pass through the milk with blue fuzzy stripes. Milk molecules help scatter photons in laser beams, similar to cosmic dust clouds scattering light from other invisible stars. Wang Peng, a postdoctoral fellow at California Institute of Technology, showed this camera in a new video. According to him, it takes about 2000 picoseconds (millionth of a second) for light to pass through the bottle. Surprisingly, 65.438+000 billion frames per second is only a small part of the camera capture ability of California Institute of Technology. This camera named T-CUP was first described in a paper published in "Light: Science and Application" on June 20 18.
It is reported that it can shoot light at the speed of 10 trillion frames per second. The purpose of the researchers' development is to capture the incredible details of ultrashort laser pulses-in other words, to capture the speed of light. When the camera on your mobile phone takes two-dimensional photos, T-CUP is a striped camera, which can record one-dimensional images very, very quickly. Different from the previous fringe camera, T-CUP can image the whole laser pulse in one frame, while the previous fringe camera synthesized the light image by recording different horizontal slices of multiple laser pulses. It transmits a laser beam to two different cameras at the same time, and then uses a computer program to merge the two images.
More importantly, according to Wang Leehom, a professor at California Institute of Technology and one of the inventors of the camera, researchers may soon be able to surpass the capabilities of T-CUP with a camera that can record 65,438+0 trillion frames per second. In a subsequent video, the researchers said that this speed camera will one day enter the field of medical research. This will enable researchers to image human living tissues (including the brain) in unprecedented detail. We'll tell you to watch out for more updates-but anyway, you may not be fast enough to see them.
Boko Park-Popular Science | Research/From: California Institute of Technology and Optics
Text: Brandon speck tor/ Field Science
Reference journal literature: light: science and application.
DOI: 10. 1038/s 4 1377-0 18-0044-7
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